The 77-page paper, written by Emory University School of Law professors Morgan Cloud and George Shepherd, concludes that widespread manipulation of law school graduate employment data may have not only pushed institutions higher in the national law school rankings, but also could be considered “mail and wire fraud under federal law.”

The U.S. News ranking of the country’s law schools may be so flawed by deceptive or misleading statistics submitted by the country’s law schools that “the harm done for many years to thousands of people has been so severe, it should not be hard to recognize the need for investigations by federal authorities to determine whether crimes have been committed,” the pair conclude in the paper.

“We have simply looked at law schools and the rankings as if they were any other industries, subject to the same laws that apply to everyone else,” says Cloud in an interview about the draft study, which was published on the Social Science Research Network.